


diamonds on the soles of her shoes

by texasreznikova



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: F/F, frail noblewoman katya, its not a the handmaiden au but its not not a the handmaiden au, ok it is a the handmaiden au but with a lot of plot divergence and its set in russia in 1914, period typical anti sex work sentiment, siberian peasant lass trixie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26823301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/texasreznikova/pseuds/texasreznikova
Summary: It's 1914 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and nineteen-year-old orphan Trixie has been offered a very interesting proposition.
Relationships: Trixie Mattel/Katya Zamolodchikova
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	diamonds on the soles of her shoes

_March 1914_

It is evening in Saint Petersburg, and a cold spit of something in between rain and snow sends its citizens scurrying home to palaces and slums and everything in between. Trixie lingers, though, returning home; home, she thinks, is a generous word to describe Anushka’s orphanage. Orphanage, too, is perhaps too generous - baby farm would be more accurate. Anushka’s is a bitter woman, hardened from forty years of factory labor. It is here Saint Petersburg’s poor deliver their unwanted babies, here that Anushka nurses them along with her own and raises them en masse for a few rubles apiece. Trixie was one of the oldest, at eight years old, to be delivered to Anushka’s house, and her mother paid no sum; she’d been dead ten months. She’s lived at Anushka’s for eleven years now, taking care of the children, scrubbing the floors, taking in the neighbors’ laundry to make ends meet, when money was scarce, which was more often, nowadays.

Trixie, at nineteen, is hardy and full-faced; built for Siberian snow, her mother used to tell her, though Trixie has never left Petersburg. Because it is dangerous to be a young woman here, she most often wears slacks and men’s blouses and hides her hair in a wool cap. One could tell she was a woman if they looked close enough, paid enough attention, but no one really did. Covered and hidden in a men’s wool coat, patched and threadbare, she did little to turn heads. Trixie figures it might not be so if she was smaller, prettier, but she stands nearly six feet in her winter boots; she’s broad-shouldered with too-big feet, like a puppy.

Trixie took after her mother in all but her coloring. She had Varya’s dark almond eyes, her prominent nose, her high cheekbones. Only Trixie’s considerable height and thick blond braids betrayed another parent’s existence somewhere, another stranger’s blood running through her veins. She knew only a handful of things about her father - that he was Polish, from Krakow; that it was he who christened her Patrycja after his own mother; that he left before she could remember him; and that he was probably dead, or worse, never bothered to find her again.

Trixie had not even a patronymic to establish any paternity. She’d never needed it to place her; in the slums and in the streets she’d always been just Trixie, the only Trixie, of course. Trixie might have spent her whole life never encountering any written form in which she’d have to leave the space for the patronymic blank. She was barely literate, unregistered and unlisted in any formal capacity. Like most of Petersburg’s urban poor she lived her life on the seams of recorded society, where census-takers and doctors didn’t bother to go.

Trixie’s mother arrived in Petersburg from Ust-Sysolk in the far north, a far-flung and forgotten land; Varya used to tell Trixie bedtime stories about miles and miles of virgin taiga, of winters blanketed in the thickest, whitest snow, snow that didn’t turn black from soot within an hour of falling, like it did here.

“Will you take me there someday?” Trixie used to ask. And Varya would insist that she would, as soon as they had a little money saved away, but there never was money, not for long enough.

When Varya died Trixie lived alone in their one-room flat for a while, until the landlord kicked her out. She lived on the streets, then; it was May when she died, and she got along all right through the summer and the autumn; often hungry, rarely cold. With winter looming ever closer, she’d been desperate for a warm bed, hardly frightened by tales of all the terrible things that could happen to little girls who trusted strangers. In the end things worked out well enough. Anushka scouted her and took her in in October, just before the first snowfall.

In eleven years, Anushka had not hugged Trixie. She had never told her she loved her, never let her forget the terms in which she used her food and shelter were conditional. The little ones liked her all right, but children aren’t picky - if you feed them, and clothe them, and bathe them, and bestow upon them the smallest bit of attention, you have their trust and their affection.

When Trixie slips in the door today she is quiet, because the little ones are sleeping. It’s so rare that they all fall asleep at once, even when Anushka gives them a drop of vodka in their bottles. For the first time in weeks, Trixie can hear herself _think_.

She begins to chop carrots and onions, for dinner - a thin broth with no meat, hardly enough to quell the gnawing stomachs of the older children, but it will have to do. She winces as the knife comes down hard, brushing the side of her finger.

She wonders what the tsar is eating for dinner. She bets it’s delicious, and filling. Bastard. It is almost Lent, and soon Russians will give up sweets, and butter, and meat, to commemorate Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. For those Russians, like Trixie, who have no sweets nor butter nor meat in the first place, it is something foreign, the luxury of a _sacrifice_.

A rhythmic knock on the door interrupts Trixie’s daydreams, and her heart sinks as the first irritable cry of a woken baby pierces the rare silence.

Y _ou’d think whoever comes round this place would have the courtesy to knock a little quieter if they didn’t hear crying,_ Trixie thinks, miffed.

She opens the door to see a man dressed better than anyone she’s ever seen up-close. He has shifty, pale eyes and his mustache is impeccably waxed and groomed so that it resembles the tusks of a walrus. He smells of Cuban cigars and too much cologne. Trixie dislikes him immediately.

“Grigori Mikhailovitch Kuznetsov,” he introduces himself.

His voice carries the crisp, impeccable accent of a Petersburg noble, which takes Trixie by surprise. She isn’t sure why someone of this station is in their flat and she’s not sure she wants to find out.

“Is Anna Andreevna in?”

“I don’t think so,” says Trixie. And she would know, wouldn’t she, if Anushka was home: it was hard to avoid someone in a three-room flat.

Grigori does not ask before he sits himself at the head of the kitchen table, spreading his legs and reclining. “Who are you? Not one of the orphans - you’re a little old, aren’t you?”

“I work here,” Trixie says hesitantly. “I’m Trixie Firkus.”

“Firkus,” Grigori repeats. “Polish?”

“My father was Polish,” says Trixie. “My mother was Komi, from Vologda Governorate.”

“I have friends in Lodz,” says Grigori self-importantly. “Nobles,” he adds, with the implied _you wouldn’t know them_.

He draws a cigar from his waistcoat pocket and lights it. “Do you know why I’m here today?”

 _Not for any good reason_ , thinks Trixie sourly.

“No.”

Grigori smiles an unpleasant, sick, close-lipped smile. “Do you like working here at Anna Andreevna’s?”

“I - I like having food in my belly, and a roof over my head,” says Trixie, truthfully.

“But are you happy?”

Trixie almost laughs. _Happy?_ No one here is happy. Not Anushka herself, not the babies, not the neighbors, not even the mice when they’ve found a scrap of bread in the alley behind the flat.

Grigori seems to take her incredulous expression as his answer. “I have a job for a young woman,” he says, “at an estate twenty miles south of Petersburg.”

“I am not a prostitute, Grigori Mikhailovich,” Trixie says sharply. She’s been met with this offer before, countless times for nearly a decade, from everyone from drunken Imperial officers to beggars in the street.

Kuznetsov waves his hands. “No, no, you misunderstand me. Can you clean?”

“Yes.”

“Arrange hair?”

“Yes.”

“Speak French?”

“A little,” says Trixie. “Not well. Anushka taught me some in case I ever need to find maid work. The rich ladies like it when you speak French, she says.”

“Anna Andreevna is right,” says Kuznetsov, still not abandoning Anushka’s formal name and patronymic. Trixie wonders, distantly, how they know each other. “You would not, of course, be any maid. “You’d be - he pauses for a few heavy seconds, pursing his lips into a thin, straight line. “You would help me.”

He strokes his mustache as he details a plan, the cruelest, most twisted plan Trixie’s ever heard, which is saying something, for Trixie has lived on the streets and in Anushka’s house for twelve years and has seen plenty of rotten deals and under-the-table arrangements. Trixie is to go and serve as a handmaid for this Catherine, convince her to consider her suitor -- Kuznetsov -- as a hand in marriage. Then, when they are married and Catherine’s massive inheritance is in Kuznetsov’s hands, he will take advantage of her psychological condition, already frail since the suicide of her mother Svetlana, and institutionalize her. Once the money belongs to Kuznetsov, and Kuznetsov alone, Trixie will have her fair share, Kuznetsov promises. Enough to raise Trixie out of the slums and into a life worth living.

Trixie feels guilty even considering the proposition but that comfortable life is so tempting and so beyond her reach now, plus Catherine’s a noblewoman, and the nobles treat people like Trixie like worse than dirt anyways. For Trixie, anyways, it’s hard to feel too remorseful about hurting someone like that. People like the Zamolodchikovs have exploited people like Trixie since the era of serfdom -- isn’t it time Trixie takes a little bit back, a little bit of what belongs to her?

She looks Kuznetsov squarely in the eyes; it’s not hard, because she stands nearly the same height as him. “I’ll do it.” “

Very good,” Kuznetsov purrs. “I’ve already bought a ticket; your train leaves Monday.”


End file.
